Pablo Jofré’s alphabet begins with Abyss and travels through Caravan, Jewel, and Narcolepsy before arriving at Xenophobia, charting the Berlin-based Chilean poet's obsessive exploration of the world around him through the lens of politics, relationships, and travel. Awarded the Gabriela Mistral Chilean National Literature Contest for his book Abecedario originally in Spanish, this English-language edition, Abecedary, is supported by the Chilean government's prestigious National Council of Arts and Culture Translation Support Grant.

“Kyn. Taniya exposed the relationship between modernity and the avant-garde. His speed and calm, his temporality and permanence, his economy and spatiality, his visualness and sound, his humor and science bear witness to the changes and contradictions of his era. That’s where his importance resides: poetic exaltation as description of mood, prediction, and perfume traversing minds like the globe as it spins. Luckily, Kyn. Taniya’s work found David Shook and Anthony Seidman, two poet-translators who understand the social, political, emotional, and sarcastic currents of the work of this aviator and Mexican poet. The translators revel—like hummingbirds in nectar—in the reconstruction of Kyn. Taniya’s language, with all its glint and rhythm, its ideology and melancholy.” —Giancarlo Huapaya

“These four manifestos of Russian Futurism, charting key points in the rapid unfolding of the Russian avant-garde, provoke the appreciative bourgeoisie while declaring the liberation of the word, the phoneme, and even the grapheme! Dralyuk’s brisk, inventive translations convey the energy and rowdiness of the original.” —Eugene Ostashevsky

Upper Limit Los Angeles

About the Bureau

The Poetic Research Bureau is a valise fiction and portable literary service in Northeast Los Angeles.

Our living room at 951 Chung King Rd in Chinatown hosts an extended community of autodidacts and guessworkers caught up in language, inquiry and the unguarded arts. Just as it is: a community free school by day, and by night, a non-professional public forum for presentations, readings, screenings and sundry intellectual exchanges.

As an out-of-pocket California milk-crate boosterist enterprise, the PRB also serves as the irregular literary umbrella for projects such as occasional poetry journal The Germ ('97-'05), edited by Andrew Maxwell and Macgregor Card; and art-lit mag Area Sneaks, edited by Rita Gonzalez and Joseph Mosconi.

As a research bloc, the Bureau attempts to cultivate composition, publication and distribution strategies that enlarge the public domain. It favors appropriations, impersonations, 'compost' poetries, belated conversations, unprintable jokes and doodles, 'unoriginal' literature, historical thefts and pastiche. The publication emphasis is on ephemeral works, short-run magazines and folios, short-lived reprints and excerpts in print-on-demand formats, and the occasional literary fetish objects of stupidly incomparable price and value.

Several reading series are hosted at 951 CKR, and we welcome writers whose work lacks the 'commercial tendency' while harboring the bright, high-minded intentions that often lead to broad panic, righteous perversions, improbable arguments, and the ill-served cul-de-sacs of genius. The series are coordinated by the aforementioned Messrs Maxwell and Mosconi. If you're sympatico, passing through town, or need a megaphone, 50 seats and a big blank space, give us a write.